PETA, the animal rights organization known for its graphic and often undercover footage has a new trick up its sleeve. They hope people will swear off chicken by giving them the bird’s-eye view — literally.
The new three-minute long virtual reality game I, Chicken lets users experience what it’s like to be a free-roaming hen on an idyllic pasture … and then what it’s like to be one of the 26 million chickens crammed into factory-farm pens and prepped for slaughter every day. Jason Koebler at Vice Motherboard has more:
It’s certainly not subtle, but PETA isn’t known much for its subtlety: In I, Chicken, participants are asked to flap their wings and walk around from the poultry’s perspective in order to get a feel for what it’s like to be a farm animal. In the demo I viewed, the player was asked to hang out and interact with other chickens in an open field, presumably to show that chickens are, in fact, social animals.
Obviously, things take a turn for the worst, when a farmer grabs the participant and shoves him or her into a cage with a bunch of other shaking chickens, and you eventually go to the slaughterhouse.
Starting with UC Berkeley, PETA plans to take I, Chicken to more than a hundred college campuses over the next school year. They’re hoping to convince lots of students to willingly play the game and ditch the bird for good. But since it sounds like the most anxiety-inducing experience ever, I’d willingly skip the chicken in order to not play it.
